The image may be boring but the subject is SO important. Remember how many hours you’ve spent researching and collecting your local or family history? Can you imagine if that was all lost in a flash?

We all know of someone or heard of someone who has lost everything – hard drive failure, bushfires, floods, human errors?

They say the date is important because it’s the day before April Fool’s Day and of course no-one wants to be an April Fool. Although it is a little difficult from the various articles to tell if World Backup Day is 31st March or 1st April.

It really doesn’t matter because in reality EVERY day is important but today is a good reminder of what you should be doing – backing up your data!

I was once manager of the I.T. Department of a large public hospital. Our procedures were locked in stone – backup two copies to tape, then cycle what was called Grandfather – Father – Son backups. We never missed and the operator signed the daily ops sheet to confirm it was done. When the backup was completed, one set was put aside to be transported off-site so if anything happened to the computer room, mainframe, hard drives or local backups, there was always a safe copy kept off-site.

What could go wrong with such watertight procedures?

WE DIDN’T REGULARLY REVERSE THE PROCEDURE – we didn’t check restoring from the backup tapes! We found out the hard way – when we tried to restore from backup – we found that our tape unit had a parity error which meant that for months ALLtapes were useless.

To recover the hospital’s vital database an expert had to be flown out from Blue Bell, Pennsylvania to Australia to ‘recreate’ that part of the database that was corrupted with the parity error – literally bit by bit.

Remember to regularly test that you can restore and read the files that you’ve backed up.

GFHG MeetingMarch 27, 2019 at 7:30 pm – 9:30 pmBelmont Library, 163 High St, Geelong VIC 3216, AustraliaPresenter: Peter Begg; Topic: The creation of his book - Geelong - The First 150 Years - from his Geelong Advertiser day by day articles.